Kya Hua Tera Wada? where is the promise of 1 crore jobs

October 3, 2017, 8:53 PM IST

Photo: PTI

Three-quarters of NDA government have passed, soon this government will have to take its report card and go to the public’s court. Now it’s time to look at those promises of Make in India, Digital India, Skills India, houses for every person, 200 new smart cities and one crore jobs every year.

In 2013, Narendra Modi in Agra’s rally had promised to create 10 million jobs (1 crore jobs) every year for youth but the centre had miserably failed to do so.

Modi’s long-standing promises highly influenced the voters. But the public was disappointed due to the delay in resolving the corruption cases, lack of development rate and the delay in taking policy decisions.

There were hopes that the economic growth rate will get new momentum and employment will increase significantly in the country. However, in the last quarter, the economic growth rate was 5.7 percent.
Because of this crisis, India’s international financial markets also collapsed, affecting the growth rate globally.

On what basis did BJP promise to create 10 million jobs every year? Was there any confidence in the increment of economic growth rate or was it misestimating the then global and domestic economic conditions?

What happened to the schemes:

All the schemes, such as Digital India, Make in India, etc had little success and three years passed by the country and the promises of generating 10 million jobs every year started to look futile.

Now the Modi Government is caught in a double crisis. Neither the economic growth rate is rising nor there is an increase in employment. According to the new series of GDP calculations, the economic growth rate has come down to 5.7 percent and according to former BJP finance minister Yashwant Sinha, it is believed that it has actually reached to 3.7 percent.

The period of drastic fall in employment:

The fall in employment generation has begun. Labour Bureau statistics show that there has been a huge decline in Narendra Modi’s government and now on an average, 3.4 lakh jobs are being created every year. It is half of the employment generation during the 2009-2014 period.

According to the fifth annual survey of employment and unemployment of the Bureau of Labor Bureau, unemployment is increasing at the rate of 5 percent. Employment increased only by 1.34 percent in July to September 2015.

Then demonetisation happened:

On November 8, 2016, the Narendra Modi government had announced the closure of old 500 and 1000 notes for the abolition of black money, destruction of terror funding and ban of the spread of fake notes in the country. This decision of the government had hit the whole country. The economy suffered by this abrupt move, and its worst impact was in the employment of people.

The report for the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy i.e. CMIE in July said that in the last four months of 2016, 1.5 million jobs decreased from September to December 2016. During the period from September to December 2016, there were 40 million 65 lakh jobs in the country, but the number of jobs decreased from 4 to 5 million in January to April 2017.

Export sector suffered:

The export sector has been in severe trouble for the past three years. During 22 months of the last 33 months, there has been a decline in exports. Indeed, there is a large share of Indian jewellery, leather and textile in Indian exports. The condition of these three sectors has worsened due to the ban on bondage.

Slaughter of slaughter-house law:

This year, in the name of Gau Raksha, animal slaughter ban was imposed on slaughterhouses across the country including UP. All this was done under environmental protection law. Seeing this, there was a panic in the leather and meat-based industries. The necessity of obtaining licenses for meat shops and slaughterhouses broke the backbone of the meat and leather industry. Leather industries in Kanpur had to be stopped under the pressure of RSS and BJP workers.

Most of its impact was on the employment of Dalits and Muslims, whose large population is related to this industry. This law worsened the condition of employment in Dalits. They already have more unemployment than other communities.

GST bombardment:

The government was advised not to show any hurry on the GST front after the serial bomb blasts on the labour market. But the government implemented it on July 1 in the name of tax. Its impact was clearly visible at the economic growth rate and it reduced to 5.7 percent. Many rating agencies have constantly anticipated reducing the growth rate. Recently, one of the three rating agencies, Fitch Ratings, also lowered the annual growth forecast.

In 2019, Narendra Modi will hardly be able to promise the youth of India that if BJP comes to power, it will provide 10 million jobs every year!